Category: Directing

1. “Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places, they open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our life time, we need to keep them alive.”

2. “Film is history. With every foot of film that is lost, we lose a link to our culture, to the world around us, to each other and to ourselves.”

3. “Black and white is never really black and white. It’s shades of grey.”

4.on Akira Kurosawa: “The term ‘giant’ is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.”

5. “L’avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, mon amour”. Or “La Dolce Vita”. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked L’Avventura. I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired La Dolce Vita, but I was challenged by L’ Avventura. Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. I was mesmerized by L’Avventura and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries – or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.” Continue reading “Martin Scorcese’s 20 Quotes on Film”→

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1. “I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

2. “How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.’ This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don’t want this to happen to 2001.

3. “Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”

4. “I don’t think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don’t think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.”

5. “Heroic violence in the Hollywood sense is a great deal like the motivational researchers’ problem in selling candy. The problem with candy is not to convince people that it’s good…but to free them from the guilt of eating it. We have seen so many times that the body of a film serves merely as an excuse for motivating a final blood-crazed slaughter by the heroes of his enemies, and at the same time to relieve the audience’s guilt of enjoying this mayhem.” Continue reading “Stanley Kubrick’s 20 Quotes on Film”→

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it...

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All of these quotes were chosen from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. Additionally, the comments in front of some of the quotes were added due to the collaboration of Christopher Murrie, A.C.E.

1. Blue or red may mean totally different things to you and me. But as long as my interpretation of a colour is consistent, eventually you’ll become aware (subconsciously, I hope) of how I’m using that colour, and what I’m using it for.

2. Don’t let the difficulty of actually achieving a shot make you think that the shot is good. (This times a million. The audience doesn’t care how hard/cool it was to get that shot. If it isn’t right, it isn’t right. As an editor, this one gets me pretty frustrated. Don’t be precious.)

3. There are no small decisions in movie-making. Nowhere does this apply more than in editing.

4. Almost every picture is improved by a good musical score. To start with, music is a quick way to reach people emotionally. (True. But be careful when using temps. Make your scenes play without music first. Then, score enhances what is already great. It is too easy to lean on music to make a scene play when it otherwise wouldn’t. Hell, I like to cut with no sound at all sometimes just to make every idea play as best I can purely on the basis of the visuals.)